Israel’s Political/Military Strategy
Israel’s perception of its security needs dominates its foreign and domestic policy. While Israel clearly has the strongest military in the region, its policies towards the Arab states and relations with the Palestinians are driven by security considerations.
At first, Israel’s concerns were its immediate Arab neighbors. Of late, its greater concerns are Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the country’s internal security, which is constantly under threat from Palestinian armed resistance. While so far the latter has been limited to suicide bombings, and more recently to barrages of homemade Qassam rockets launched at Israeli townships around the Gaza Strip, it nonetheless has the potential of expanding into an all-out war, reminiscent of the Algerian War of Independence against France.Israeli military strategy after the 1948 war was essentially defensive, but the country took on an essentially offensive strategy with the 1956 war. This was possible with French military assistance in tanks, armored personnel carriers, and aircrafts. During that war, the predominance of air force was matched in strategic thinking by the innovative use of rapid moving armor and supporting infantry devised by the late General Moshe Dayan, the architect of the 1956 and 1967 Israeli victories over the Arab states.
After the 1956 war, Israel’s military strategy was reshaped to conduct operations outside Israel, preferably in the open desert, where air and armor superiority, as well as tactical planning, would favor Israel. The 1967 war confirmed these military assumptions. In fact, Israel’s strategy and tactics in that war were almost a carbon copy of those used in the 1956 war. In 1967, within hours of the conflict’s opening, Israel had destroyed over 70 percent of Egypt’s air force on the ground, quickly rendering the rest ineffective. The rapid advances on the ground in the Sinai in 1967 were also almost identical to those of 1956.
The 1982 war in Lebanon reflected the strategy of occasional incursion outside Israel and the development of a controlled military buffer zone in Lebanese territory. Twenty years later, the strategy was recognized as a failure, and Israel under Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew its forces from Lebanon in 2000.
The 1973 war had a significant impact on Israel’s future strategy, which took into account the need to overwhelm all of its enemies simultaneously on multiple fronts. This meant that Israel’s military had to be able to simultaneously defeat all four surrounding Arab states: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. As a result, the Israeli military significantly increased its ground troop capabilities, air force, and motorized units of tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The strength of the Israeli military rests upon a longstanding strategic alliance with the United States, which was enhanced during the Clinton administration, when Israel started to assemble and manufacture components of Abrams M-4 tanks and aircrafts and work on joint projects with the United States in arms technology. As a result, Israel’s military capabilities have reached the point where its forces can simultaneously confront all Arab countries at once.
Israel’s militarized society arises out of legitimate security concerns, as well as complex psychological factors bound to the experience of the Holocaust. One aspect of Israeli military policy is to defend the promise of “never again” by ensuring that Israel has the capacity to defend itself against virtually any conceivable threat. It is with this mindset that Israel embarked in the 1950s on the development of nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them.
Nuclear weapons cannot have a strategic utility in a conflict in the region, particularly because of the close proximity of possible enemy targets to Israel’s own civilian population. But Israel’s nuclear strategy satisfies two needs: it provides a “security blanket” for the Israeli population, and it represents the ultimate deterrent if an Arab state or a coalition of Arab states manages to seriously threaten Israel’s existence.
In fact, it is hard to see how such a scenario could occur. Even if an Arab state or a coalition of states could prevail in a series of battles and occupy some parts of Israel, it is almost inevitable that the United States, other countries, and the United Nations Security Council would intervene and impose a cease-fire. To contemplate the possibility that Israel could drop a nuclear weapon on Amman, Cairo, or the Aswan Dam is unthinkable. Yet for Israel, the possibility represents an effective deterrent, even as Egypt and other Arab states regard the idea as unacceptable nuclear blackmail.Removing Israel’s nuclear deterrent from its line of defense would require an effective regional security regime and the development of a culture of trust and cooperation. It would also require eliminating all weapons of mass destruction from the region. These goals can only be considered after bilateral peace treaties are signed between Israel and respectively, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, and after a final settlement of the Palestine Question. Israel’s contemporary strategy is based on a de facto military alliance with the United States. America did not launch the first and second Gulf Wars because of its alliance with Israel, but the concern for Israel’s security is always a factor in U.S. policy in the region, and Iraq definitely represented the only Arab country that could have threatened Israel militarily. And, although a nuclear Iran might be a threat to the Arab world as much as it is a threat to Israel, it is America’s overriding concern with Israel’s security that is a major driving motive in U.S. pressure on Iran to reduce its military capabilities, and in particular, to make sure that it does not acquire the capacity to develop and/or deliver nuclear weapons. The joint military-political strategies of Israel and the United States are also aimed against Islamic Fundamentalists. This strategic alliance was reinforced after the events of 9/11, and in response the Arab and Muslim masses tend to view Israel and the United States as allied against them, thus fueling joint anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments.
Among Arabs and Muslims, there are those who believe that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States was purposely driving the Bush administration’s anti-Arab and anti-Islamic positions in order to radicalize Arabs and Muslim against the United States, leaving Israel the only United States ally in the region. Israel’s alliance with American-Christian Zionists (the Religious Right in the United States) brings credence to this belief.
The unforeseen alliance between American-Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is an alliance of convenience. The Christian fundamentalists believe that the Messiah will mean the return of Jesus Christ on earth once the Jews of the world have accomplished the possession of Eretz-Israel and the ingathering of the exiles, the consequences of which are bound to be the removal of the Palestinians from Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. The America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington, might not share the same eschatological vision of America’s evangelists, but it uses the alliance with them to promote what they view as Israel’s political and strategic interests. AIPAC has definitely developed a position on the peace process that is frequently counterproductive and reprehensible.
Contemporary Israeli political strategy consists of a double-edged drive to consolidate its alliance with the United States while preventing too intimate a relationship between America and its Arab allies in the region. In that sense, the radicalization of Arabs and Muslims serves as a message to the United States that Israel is, after all, the most reliable ally America can expect to have in the region. At the same time, the alliance of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with the United States. is an Israeli interest so long as America keeps its pledge of maintaining Israel’s military edge on its Arab neighbors. After all, it is Saudi Arabia’s alliance with the United States that brought it to conceive the so-called Arab peace initiative, and it is Egypt’s alliance with the United States that made Egypt into a regional peace broker that serves well Israel’s interest.
The recent cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was brokered by Egypt is a case in point. Israel certainly expects U.S. economic and military support to secure its conventional military superiority over all combined Arab states and its monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region.Israel’s internal security strategy is to reduce the eventual Palestinian state to a demilitarized one and to surround it militarily so as to isolate it from Jordan, with a militarized wall separating it from Israel.
This Israeli strategic vision is one of the factors contributing to the difficulties of peace. The strategic policy of Israel is very much a reflection of its self-perception and the perception of its Arab neighbors, Palestinians, and Muslims in general. In short, if Israel perceives itself as an island in the midst of a hostile Arab sea and of growing Muslim hostility around the world, it can only react by fortifying its island militarily and turn more toward the West for its political, economic, and social links. Paradoxically, this attitude reinforces Israel’s separation and alienation from its surroundings and from its neighbors.
Only a new perspective by Israel of its place in the region can change its strategic orientation. This can only be accomplished by considering Israel’s security in terms of regional security and by Israel’s joining its Arab neighbors in developing a regional security regime that includes the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. This approach would essentially turn enemies into allies, much as Europe was able to achieve after WWII.
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